“A good friend will always stab you in the front.”

―Oscar Wilde

“A really good friend will stab you in all sorts of places and you will enjoy every minute of it.”

—Jean, to Jean, translated by Jean from Jeanspeak

The gates had opened to a vision of carnage. Two young men, identical in life, utterly dissimilar in death, were spread across the corridor like strawberry jam on morning toast, which in itself was quite dreadful since it was well past afternoon. Various elements of their anatomy were attached to the surfaces of the long corridor, slowly oozing downward, leaving gooey smudges in their wake. At the far end of the corridor, a thin black film with a pock-marked surface was whipping about like a curtain in the wind. Alarmingly, any movement of air in the corridor was prominently absent.

“By Crown and Stock! Have you utterly lost your mind, you demented—” the Princess shouted, instantly positioning herself behind Von Schmidt, who seemed like the most viable cover in the immediate surroundings on account of his bulk and apparent lack of dexterity.

Von Schmidt didn’t let her finish the sentence, which was probably for the best, since its last few expressions were highly inappropriate for a lady of her station. “I assure you that this is not my doing. My plans for dinner were the plainest of the plain: aperitif, hors d’oeuvre, soup, entrée, main course, dessert, and a brief live violin performance by my house ensemble. In fact, had you not reacted with such genuine vehemence, I would have suspected this barbarity to be your doing.”

“Mine?” The Princess whirled indignantly. “I assure you that if I had the skills or soldiers to effect such a massacre, I’d be having this conversation about you with your staff, not the other way around.”

Von Schmidt didn’t bother replying. Instead, he looked meaningfully at Tanaka. The samurai glanced at the black film and then looked back at Von Schmidt. Von Schmidt nodded.

Immediately, Tanaka charged, moving almost too quickly for the eye to follow. Whatever it was that he endeavored to do was accomplished so rapidly that an ill-timed blink had prevented the Princess from witnessing it. Presently, Tanaka stood calmly several meters behind the black curtain, the latter being as dispersed and ruined as the unfortunate menservants before it. If he had drawn a weapon, he’d done so too quickly for the Princess to notice.

Jean recovered from the initial shock and said, “Von Schmidt, I am sorry to say that the quality of your guests has significantly deteriorated. I can understand suffering the presence of pirates and merchants, but these filthy, mindless—”

“Your ignorance is most lamentable, Jean,” Von Schmidt said sharply. “I would gladly enlighten you as to its depth, but presently we must seek a safe place before the less malnourished friends of this somber confetti arrive. In my experience, they never travel in groups of less than a thousand, as it is impossible to jam a sufficient amount of solar wind for rapid travel otherwise.”

“Mon Dieu …” the other Jean mumbled. “Are you saying this is a flap of a sun sail? Why would anyone use a sun sail almost sixteen light-hours from the sun?”

Von Schmidt pointed at the observatory gates. The powerful gates were partially molten and the stone around them charred and cracked. “We do not have time for academic discussions. If you wish to be vaporized, burned, or torn to ribbons, by all means, do stay here. However, if your plans for the evening do not include these pastimes, I highly recommend that you kindly follow me without further argument.”

Von Schmidt turned to the samurai, who hadn’t moved an inch since his assault on the black film, and to the Russian, who was examining the corridor with wide-eyed wonder. “Tanaka and Ivanov, please help me come up with a feasible battle plan.”

Von Schmidt made a series of motions in the air and a map of the castle and the surrounding area appeared floating in front of him. It flickered and shifted often, making it difficult to read. There were black dots moving to and fro both around and inside the structure.

The three men had a brief conversation that consisted of technical terms, and hmmmm’s and ahhh’s. At its conclusion, Von Schmidt turned back to the Princess and the Jeans. “It seems that we’ll be heading to the dinner hall after all. Kindly refrain from all manner of divisive backstabbing, name-calling, or social exclusion of servants and gardeners, should any be encountered. The enemy we’re facing is quite united in its cause and does not enjoy the benefit of classes, roles, and backstabbing as we do.”

“Whose enemy, ours or yours?” the Princess asked. It did not seem likely that her family and Von Schmidt would have any common enemies. In fact, she felt that any person to whom Von Schmidt or anyone else on this planetoid referred to as “enemy” would be her friend.

Von Schmidt looked at the Princess with a grim expression that caused her to flinch. A second later, his hand shot forth at just the right speed and angle to go through her shield unobstructed, a feat that she, until this moment, believed to have been purely a conceit of poorly written space operas. Before she’d even had time to flinch, the callous fingers dug into her throat and thrust her up and against the wall. Her boots lost hold of the ground as her head rang with the impact. Pain and dizziness spread through her entire frame like molten lead flowing down her veins. Even if her windpipe weren’t blocked by the cruel fingers of this beast, she wouldn’t have been able to voice one word of protest. Terror utterly paralyzed every cell of her body, leaving her no more than a rag doll in expensive armor at the hands of a madman in an old dressing gown.

This was the first time in her life she had personally experienced violence. She was told her shield would protect her against anything one man could carry. Apparently, she had been deceived. This made her feel as vulnerable as the little girls of legends, who didn’t have shields and were thus prone to being eaten by wolves or indoctrinated by dwarves. At the moment, Von Schmidt didn’t look like an old beggar masquerading as an aristocrat. He looked like a force of nature against whom no argument, weapon, or cleverness could prevail.

“Unlike my other guests,” Von Schmidt hissed, staring her directly in the eyes, “you do not have the privilege of dying. You will come with me and you will live through this, even if I have to break several of your bones to achieve this end.”

The rest of the crowd gawked in shocked disbelief. Von Schmidt returned their stares with such ferocity that they lowered or averted their eyes, leaving the Princess feeling utterly helpless and isolated. She tried to croak something defiant, but the result was a sound that only a frog would understand.

“I trust I have made myself perfectly understood.” Von Schmidt released his grip and stepped away from the Princess. Still somewhat dazed, she nearly toppled to the floor, staying on her feet only due to a helpful arm offered by Ivanov, whose complexion had taken such a ruddy turn that one could almost mistake him for an operatic Indian. The Princess, matching his blush with paleness, spent awhile coughing and shaking, thereby losing the thread of the conversations around her. She almost clung to the Russian boy, the only person not to ignore her plight, but checked herself in the last moment. No matter how well-mannered and handsome he was, he was still her enemy.

“Have you rearranged the portals and drones to accommodate to our escape route yet?” Von Schmidt asked.

“Give few more minutes,” the Russian answered distractedly. “When I finish, we can move. But some of this drjan is in our way. Must be careful.”

“No,” Tanaka said. “Let he who’s in our path be careful.”

The gates in the other end of the corridor slid open, revealing a disastrous scene of thermal destruction. Bright blue streaks marked locations where the integrity of the structure was compromised, and the cracks automatically sealed with silicon foam. The Princess couldn’t even guess the former utility of this room, so thoroughly was it overturned. At present, it looked like the core of a rural furnace or a scene from a film her brother would enjoy while the rest of the family admonished him for enjoying it.

Even though now Von Schmidt was nowhere near her and seemed oblivious to her very existence, his strange eyes, one artificial and one natural, had a profoundly unsettling effect on her. The man dared publicly strike a guest who’d had water and bread under his roof. There was simply no telling what he might do next. Even lowly bourgeois respected the time-honored tradition of hospitality. However, unlike lowly bourgeois, Von Schmidt seemed to possess skills that had made the most advanced defensive mechanisms in the cosmos redundant.

Von Schmidt smiled beatifically at the Princess. “I do most sincerely apologize for my earlier outburst, my dear lady. Your words struck a chord. You’re thinking that the enemy of your enemy is your friend. You’re mistaken. The injustice that our species has wrought upon our uninvited guests is so enormous that no amount of spurious apologies or halfhearted compensation will ever correct it in their eyes. They cannot tell the difference between a German soldier and a slab of cheese, let alone between a young royal and an old libertine. I beseech you, do not attempt to do anything romantically foolish. If history has taught us anything, it is that when a princess missteps, other people take the fall.”

“What guests, you ghastly brute?!” the Princess shouted. “There’s no one here but myself and your fellow ghouls.”

Von Schmidt paid her insults no more heed than he would have the barking of a chihuahua. Instead, he nodded at the black cloth Tanaka had shredded and said, “Why, there lies the body of one of your beloved refugees, the chornoi. Had Tanaka not dealt with it, you wouldn’t be able to hold hands with your lovely Russian count on account of neither of you having hands.”